Friday, September 27, 2013

I
don't want to whine and I'm not alleging brutal treatment or anything
like that. But I believe I'm on a list in Norway, too, and that I've
been treated like a criminal, to some extent, although I have no
criminal record in Norway or anywhere else. (He admits,
embarrassed...) Nothing that happened was all that notable, but
notable enough that I thought it deserved a blog post.

I was
on a flight between two of the world's richest, most egalitarian
democracies – Denmark and Norway. Copenhagen and Trondheim,
specifically. The plane landed, we all walked down the stairs. As
soon as I entered the terminal building, there was a customs agent
with a sniffer dog. The dog dutifully sniffed my jeans, my guitar,
my bag, my shirt (climbing up onto me a bit in order to do so, but I
don't mind, I like dogs). My jeans should probably have been thrown
into the laundry bag the night before, but I figured I'd wear them
another day or two, they weren't smelling too bad, although they had
just endured an evening at Ungdomshuset, the premier punk rock social
center in Copenhagen, where I had had a great gig the night before,
amidst a thick cloud of (predominantly) tobacco smoke.

I'm
no expert on sniffer dogs, but on the Canadian border I have
witnessed one of them find a small amount of marijuana (OK, it was
me, I had accidentally taken half a joint in the van with me, which
my girlfriend had left in a case of sunglasses, unbeknownst to me –
no charges). When the Canadian sniffer dog found the roach, it
barked excitedly. (Score!) This Norwegian sniffer dog did not bark.
It sniffed me thoroughly and then it seemed to indicate it was done,
and ready for the next job. (A friend here in Trondheim informs me
that Norwegian sniffer dogs wag their tails when they find something,
rather than barking.)

The
Customs agent informed me, however, that the dog had noticed
something. OK, I thought, perhaps it's conceivable my jeans smelled
of hash, but mostly tobacco, and I certainly had no illegal drugs on
my person or in any of my luggage, guitar case, etc. But the dog
hadn't barked, that's for sure.

The
agent took me into a room and closed the door.

“Do
you have any drugs on you?”

“No,”
I replied.

“Did
you smoke any pot recently?”

I
assume they're interested in actual, physical specimens of pot, not
whether it's in my bloodstream, but I answered honestly, that at the
gig the night before I had had a couple hits on someone's joint. I
just like them to know that this is normal and they should feel
stupid for asking such questions, and I feel no reason to lie about
doing something that millions of their fellow Scandinavians do every
day.

“Do
you have any luggage?”

“Yes,
on the carousel.”

“Come
with me.” He took me to another room, one I had been in before,
unnecessarily (and rudely, it seemed to me) pulling me along by my
bag to make sure I was coming to the right room. I was,
incidentally, not wearing any offensive clothing – just relatively
clean pants and a t-shirt featuring the logo of a Danish trade union.

The
agent motioned for me to put my things on a metal table. This guy
wasn't big on verbal communication, although he was fluent in
English, as are the vast majority of Norwegians.

A
female agent came in.

“Passport?”

I
handed my passport to her. The male agent then asked what I was
doing in Norway.

“Playing
a gig in Trondheim tomorrow, and Oslo the next day.”

“Come
with me,” he said, once my stuff was on the table. He took me
into a small, windowless room. Same one I was in with a different
Customs agent a few months ago, last time I flew from Copenhagen to
Trondheim.

“Do
you have any drugs with you?” There was that question again.

“No,”
I replied again.

“If
you have any drugs with you, you have to tell me now.”

That's
an interesting thing to say, given that it's plainly not true. I
don't know Norwegian law, but I'm pretty sure I don't have to tell
him anything self-incriminating without a lawyer present. In any
case, they're obviously combing through all my stuff on the metal
table in the other room, which I can't see from our windowless cell,
so if I have any drugs with me, they'll presumably find them, and
don't need me to tell them about it first.

He
then instructed me to remove each article of clothing, one at a time.
He searched every pocket, turned everything inside-out, etc. After
he had me completely naked, he instructed me to turn around and lift
each of my feet up, to make sure I had nothing taped to the soles of
my feet, presumably. Then to open my mouth, lift my tongue. No anal
cavity search, anyway. (Maybe next time.)

He
told me to put my clothes back on. If I needed anything, I should
knock on the door, he said, helpfully. Then he left me alone in the
small, windowless room with one chair and one table, both attached to
the wall.

A few
minutes later another agent opened the door.

“How
are you getting into Trondheim?”, he asked.

“Someone's
picking me up.”

“What's
his name?”

I
actually wasn't sure. I knew whoever it was who was picking me up
was a member of Norway's Maoist party, but I wasn't sure which one
it would be. I gave him a first name.

“Is
he Norwegian?”, he asked.

“Yes.”

I
answered these questions on the assumption that they were going to
let someone out there know why I was delayed.

After
another ten or fifteen minutes, an agent opened the door.

“You
can go,” he said.

My
stuff was strewn all along the length of the metal table. Two agents
watched as I packed it all up. No one made any effort to help me do
this, which is just as well, since I prefer to do it myself (though
usually they insist on helping me zip up my guitar case and stuff,
probably because they're supposed to do that). They all looked
really disappointed.

I
walked through the “nothing to declare” line, since they clearly
already had seen every item in my luggage. On the other end was a
tall, red-faced young Norwegian Maoist, who looked somewhat
flustered.

I
apologized about the extra wait, explaining that I had been
strip-searched again. He told me that he had been identified as the
person who had come to pick me up, and was then taken into a room and
searched, though apparently not strip-searched. The sniffer dog had
taken an interest in his jacket, they told him.

This
is notable. I admittedly hang out in places where people nearby
might be smoking weed, but this guy doesn't. He's a straight-edge,
clean-cut Maoist, dressed neatly in clothing that did not indicate
any overt anti-government or even alternative culture sympathies, a
member of a party that is very anti-drug. He doesn't do drugs or
hang out with people who do. I'm sure the dog did not smell anything
untoward on his jacket, in fact.

While
he was in the room with the agent, the agent threatened to search his
car in the parking garage, asking him not whether he had any drugs in
the car, but how much. None, was the young man's honest reply. He
was quite understandably annoyed at this intimidation tactic. In the
end they didn't search his car.

My
ride and I then drove away, and went to visit the nearby village of
Hell, where I wanted to have my picture taken, which he obligingly
did for me. And then he dropped me off in Svartlamon, a neighborhood
where enough hash has been smoked over the decades that even the
walls of the buildings would probably set off one of these Norwegian
sniffer dogs.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Last
night another concert of mine in Germany was canceled due to pressure
from a political tendency here known as the Antideutsch
(Anti-Germans). The show went ahead, in this case, but in a
different venue. In previous cases, shows have been canceled due to
Antideutsch threats to boycott venues, picket, smash windows and hurt
people, depending on the case. All of these actions have been
carried out by Antideutsch elements on many occasions throughout
Germany over many years now. Their targets over the years have
included progressive artists, groups, and venues, as well as members
of the very large Palestinian community in Germany.

Since
I first encountered the Antideutsch I thought that such a bizarre
political tendency couldn't last, and I figured I'd just ignore it
and hope it went away. That was a mistake. I'm not sure if their
influence is growing, but they're certainly not going away. There
may not be more than a few hundred zealous adherents to the various
Antideutsch factions in Germany, but their influence in society and
especially on the Left is vastly disproportionate to their small
numbers, due to the historic guilt that still pervades Germany. They
take advantage of this condition to force people to make
uncomfortable or even impossible choices, again and again.

The
Antideutsch, however well-meaning in their origins, despite the fact
that some of what they do is admirable (such as opposing the far
right in various ways), is a misguided subculture that has relied on
incredibly convoluted logic to evolve into a fundamentally racist
phenomenon. Their racism should be rejected. A failure to reject
the logic of the Antideutsch is a failure to reject racism.

I'll
explain. (I know I have titled this an “Open Letter to the German
Left,” but I'll take the time here to give some background that
will be obvious to most Germans, but may be news to non-Germans.)

I'm
not alone among non-Germans who have spent significant amounts of
time in Germany in saying that Germany is the most thoughtful,
self-reflective society I have ever experienced. It is a place where
a very large proportion of the population understands their history.
Some people on the Left here will be quick to disagree with me and
talk about all the backward people out there and how much more
progress there is to be made. However, if they spend time anywhere
else in the world, I believe they will have to admit that their
society is one that has, to a vastly greater degree than France, the
US, Great Britain, and other countries with very dark histories of
colonialism and imperialism, largely come to terms with their
history. There are of course notable exceptions, but for the most
part Germans today viscerally loathe authoritarianism, war, and
everything else the Third Reich stood for.

Most
Germans especially loathe anti-Semitism. So much so that the very
topic makes people uncomfortable, and any discussion that involves
criticizing a person of Jewish lineage or an organization led by a
Jew is something many Germans would rather just avoid entirely.
Being of Jewish lineage myself, having grown up among survivors of
the Nazi holocaust, and having spent a lot of time in Germany, I
understand this.

Germans
were and are faced with the same contradictions as the rest of us
with regards to how to come to terms with anti-Semitism, and how
European Jews experienced the first half of the twentieth century,
which of course most notably involved being systematically killed by
goose-stepping Germans. How to atone for the sins of their fathers
and grandfathers? How to make sure a fascist regime doesn't take
over Germany again? How to make sure the victims of fascism don't
become victims again?

For
many Germans, particularly on the Left, the answer to these questions
lay in a rejection of authoritarianism, welcoming refugees from
dictatorships such as Pinochet's Chile, and opposing wars around the
world. For many Germans, this led them uncomfortably into the
position of opposing not only the Right in their own country, but the
US-led wars in places like Vietnam and Iraq. Not because they
supported their own country's imperial ambitions as opposed to US
imperialism, but because they opposed anyone carpet-bombing anyone
else. Been there, done that, never again – to anyone.

But
then, the question of how to view and interact with the new state of
Israel posed an even bigger challenge for German society, just as it
did for others around the world, such as the Jewish diaspora.
Guilt-ridden Germans and traumatized Jews alike faced the question –
does “never again” mean “never again” for some people or for
everyone? For most people in the world, the answer was the latter –
no one should invade someone else's country, force the inhabitants
into refugee camps and walled ghettos, etc. Ethnic cleansing was
unacceptable anywhere, even if the people doing the ethnic cleansing
had recently been victims of an even more horrible ethnic cleansing
themselves.

For a
significant portion of the Jewish diaspora, and for many people in
Germany, however, the main concern was for the well-being of Jews.
The Nazi holocaust was directly responsible for Zionism's sudden
popularity among Jews. Without the Nazi holocaust, the state of
Israel probably never would have come to exist, since the
overwhelming majority of Jews before that period of history weren't
sufficiently enticed by the idea of abandoning their homes in Europe
or North America to participate in the Zionist project. And for many
Germans, now that German fascism had played a significant role in
forcing Israel to come into existence, the Jewish homeland needed to
be supported – even if its very existence meant the ethnic
cleansing of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people who had
nothing to do with fascism in Europe.

On
the contrary, for hundreds of years while there were pogroms,
crusades and inquisitions in Europe, whose victims always included
lots of Jews among many others, during the same period in the Ottoman
Empire, Jews and other religious and ethnic minorities flourished.
But now these Arabs would have to pay for the crimes of German Nazis,
and the Zionist movement's new state – actively supported by the
US, Great Britain, West Germany and other actors on the international
scene – would be founded upon a fundamentally racist form of
governance, a Middle Eastern apartheid system, where Palestinians
were forced to flee at gunpoint while Jews got their land. After the
1967 war, when Israel annexed Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan
Heights, the Palestinians in these occupied territories would become
a people forced to live under military rule, with no right to vote,
ruled by military courts, military injustice, with settlers daily
breaking international law to take more and more of their best land
away from them.

Most
governments in the world, and most people paying attention,
especially on the Left, saw this for what it was, and declared the
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza illegal, the settlements
illegal, and demanded that the Palestinians should be able to return
to the lands from which they were forcibly displaced. But among many
in the Jewish diaspora, collectively traumatized as they were by
German fascism and anti-Semitism elsewhere, there was confusion on
this question. Were the Palestinians victims of ethnic cleansing, or
terrorists who deserved their fate? Was Israel an apartheid state
run by settlers from overseas, or a nation of long-lost refugees
returning home and doing what they had to do to stay safe?

Many
Germans (and many Jews and most other people in the world) tended to
take the former view, but generally preferred to avoid the issue,
feeling like, as descendents of the Nazis, they didn't really have
the moral authority to take a position one way or the other. Some
Germans, particularly on the Left, took the principled stance against
Israeli apartheid, despite how emotionally difficult it was for most
of them to do this, given their history, and their intense feelings
of guilt.

Enter
the Antideutsch. In the days leading up to German reunification,
many people in Germany were concerned with the prospect of a powerful
new German state. They had reason to be concerned. In the months
following reunification, the far right was emboldened in both east
and west Germany, and there were many cases of immigrants being
attacked and sometimes killed by the far right. The asylum laws in
Germany became much more restrictive. Out of this context, the
Antideutsch tendency evolved.

As
with much of the German Left, they opposed German reunification,
opposed the new restrictions on asylum-seekers, and opposed the far
right's violent attacks on the homes of refugees. But unlike the
more reasonable elements of the German Left, this new tendency
proclaimed their unconditional support for Israel. The Israeli state
claimed they represented Jews around the world, and the Antideutsch
declared that this must indeed be the case. They aligned themselves
ideologically with the most far right elements of the Jewish
diaspora, such as the Jewish Defense League, proclaiming that anyone
who criticized the state of Israel was an anti-Semite and a fascist
(as I have personally been told on numerous occasions by Antideutsch
activists).

The
Antideutsch movement started splitting almost as soon as it came into
existence. Some of the more bizarre tendencies to emerge include
those who supported the US-led war in Iraq, on the basis that Israel
supported it, so it must be good. Other elements of the movement
proclaimed that although they considered themselves to be communist,
they were opposed to criticism of capitalism, on the basis that
criticizing capitalism was a veiled form of anti-Semitism (since
apparently everyone knows that when your average anti-capitalist says
“banker” they really mean “Jewish banker”).

While
it may be easy to ridicule and dismiss some of the stranger offshoots
of the Antideutsch, the thing they all continue to agree on is the
importance of uncritically supporting the state of Israel. There
also seems to be a general agreement on the principle that any
serious criticism of the state of Israel must be actively opposed and
denounced as anti-Semitic and fascistic.

By
pushing this line throughout Germany, throughout the German Left and
elsewhere in German society, the Antideutsch are essentially
demanding that Germans, and anyone else in Germany, such as
Palestinian refugees or anti-Zionist Jews from New York (like me),
must take sides. They must either declare their unflinching
allegiance to the state of Israel, or they must admit to being
anti-Semites. They must avoid being involved with events that
include someone who is critical of Israel, or risk allegations of
anti-Semitism, smashed windows, beatings, and so on. There is no
room for debate, no room for being on the sidelines or not taking a
position on this issue, they say. You are either with us or you're
an anti-Semite.

That
is to say, you must choose: admit to being an anti-Semite, or
embrace anti-Arab racism. Support the Nazi holocaust, or support the
ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the apartheid state of
Israel.

These,
however, are false choices. There are other options – much more
sensible ones. You can use your brain, and think for yourself,
without unconditionally supporting anyone or anything. You can
acknowledge reality – that the Nazi holocaust was indeed the worst
thing humans have ever done to other humans, but that the fact that
these horrible atrocities were committed in Europe during the first
half of the twentieth century does not make it OK for the survivors
of the Nazi holocaust to go and drive 700,000 Palestinians off of
their land and into walled ghettos.

You
can reject both of these horrors. You can oppose anti-Semitism at
every turn, and also oppose ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. You
can reject the Antideutsch's false dichotomy. Or you can embrace it,
and embrace the idea that anything but unconditional support for
Israel is anti-Semitism. But then you must come to terms with an
inescapable fact: by embracing this position, you are embracing a
virulent form of racism. By embracing a blatantly, fundamentally
racist government – Israel – you are yourself a racist.

It's
your choice. Your brain. I beseech you – use it. Don't let the
Antideutsch turn you into a racist idiot who's not allowed to think
for yourself because you were born German. I know you'd rather avoid
the whole difficult issue, but the Antideutsch won't let you do that.
Reject fascism of all kinds, whether they employ gas chambers or
not. Reject imperialism, whether German, US, or British. Reject
anti-Semitism, yes, but also reject Israeli apartheid. Reject the
Antideutsch tendency. Embrace humanity, in all its forms, including
the hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians who live in your
country, and the Jews who don't agree with the twisted worldview
embraced by US imperialism, Israel's ruling parties and the
Antideutsch.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

It was a long,
cramped flight on South China Airlines. The Chinese man sitting in
the seat next to me was fidgeting and agitated during the whole
flight, except during the brief period when he slept. If I had any
Valium with me I would have offered him some. The flight ended with
a public exercise program followed by a little documentary about
Perth, the city we were about to land in, that was produced by the
airline. It described Perth's Mediterranean climate, described how
the city was located in the Swan River (which of course it isn't),
and provided tips on which neighborhoods in the sprawling city most
of the Chinese people hang out in. The film was narrated by a woman
who spoke with a North American accent, but the script was clearly
written by someone who spoke English as a very second language, and I
wondered what must have been going through the narrator's head as
she read these hopelessly butchered sentences.

Exhausted, I
waited in the Immigration line along with everyone else. Getting
towards the front of the line I could hear Immigration agents
speaking to the new arrivals, making no effort to enunciate clearly
or slow down their speech for the Chinese visitors. The agent I got
to seemed like one of the nicer ones, though, an older man with a
salt and pepper beard.

“I have a work
visa,” I proclaimed, on the assumption he might want to know.

“Don't worry,
it's all in the system,” he replied, looking at a computer screen.
After a minute or so of perusing his computer he said “welcome to
Australia, Dave.” The majority of Australians have the annoying
habit of assuming you prefer to be addressed by a nickname of their
choosing, which in my case was usually “Dave.” In his case I
didn't particularly mind, though. I liked the “welcome to
Australia” part. But after all the waiting and spending the $895
for the damn thing, I felt a bit jilted that he didn't even want to
look at my work permit.

As I walked past
him towards the baggage carousel, a younger female colleague of his
who was looking at his computer screen said, “turned away from New
Zealand,” which I was. There was a questioning tone in her voice,
as if to say, “don't you think you should have asked him about
this?” The man grunted disinterestedly.

At the cafe around
the corner from the home of my hosts, Alex and Kamala, a couple of
long-time activists and members of the organization which now calls
itself Socialist Alliance, the local Murdoch rag was boasting about
the plans the incoming Prime Minister had for dealing with what the
press regularly calls the “refugee crisis.” Australia has very
few refugees, relative to most countries, and there is no crisis in
any conventional understanding of this term, but you can't tell that
to Rupert Murdoch or to either of the two major parties, or to the
millions of Australians who vote for them, clearly as disinterested
in their own country's history as they are of international law.

Unlike in the US,
where elections happen on an almost entirely predictable timetable,
in Australia, as with most democracies, you don't always know when
they're coming, and most of my tour ended up happening in the 10 days
leading up to the election. Which coalition of parties was going to
win – the rightwing one – was a foregone conclusion, according to
the Murdoch press as well as the rest of the press, and everybody I
talked to about it, without exception.

The
outgoing Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, was engaging in a suicidal
backtracking on everything he once stood for, so that both he and
Tony Abbott were competing on how tough they could be on “stoppingthe boats,” and how thoroughly they could repeal environmental
legislation Rudd's predecessor had passed, which was Australia's
brief and apparently fleeting attempt to compensate for the fact that
it is one of the world's largest producers of coal and one of the
world's biggest contributors to climate change.

Most of the press
in Australia prefer to ignore the fact that the country is a deeply
divided class society. They refer to billionaire coal barons as
“miners,” as if any of them had ever spent a single day
underground themselves, and they lament the Carbon Tax – a tax on
some of the world's most rapacious energy companies – as if it were
a tax on the average Australian family, who would somehow be
prospering were it not for the fact that the corporations extracting
their nation's nonrenewable resources had to pay tax like everybody
else.

Despite the fact
that the Labor Party was actively stabbing its base of support in the
back, and despite the fact that everybody agreed the upcoming
conservative win was a foregone conclusion, just about everyone with
a political bone in their bodies with the exception of the anarchists
were busily campaigning for one party or the other. In the case of
most of my friends and fans, they were campaigning for the Greens or
for one of several socialist parties, or for the Wikileaks Party,
which was busily self-destructing upon my arrival in Perth, after
initially looking like a hopeful alternative to the usual suspects.

The show I did in
Perth was one of several fundraisers for the Refugee Rights Action
Network, complete with a moving appeal from the stage by an organizer
for the group, which has been involved with trying to publicize the
indefinite detention of adults as well as children being practiced by
the Australian government, the jailing of families who had dared
think they might be able to live in Australia, after finding life in
their own war-torn countries unlivable. The refugees from places
like Iraq and Afghanistan especially inconvenient, given that they
are fleeing from a chaos that the Australian government helped
create.

There in the
audience at the Workingman's Club in the progressive neighborhood of
Fremantle was Afeif Ismail, a Sudanese communist and a poet of great
renown, one of the few who did manage to get refugee status in
Australia, with the help of the United Nations, years before. As a
former political prisoner under the Sudanese dictatorship, he had
been recognized as a political refugee by the UN, and had been given
several options for countries he could move to. When I met him on my
first visit to Perth two years earlier, I remember him explaining how
he and his family decided to come to Australia. As I recall, it was
a process of elimination. The other two choices were Finland and the
US. Finland was out due to the decidedly un-Sudanese weather. The
US was out due to its imperial empire. So Australia it was.

I had been looking
forward to arriving in the southern hemisphere and enjoying a bit of
winter weather, but it was, as it happened, the end of winter, and
the beginning of spring, and was the warmest spring on record. Not
as warm as Japan in summer, which I had just left, so although it was
too warm to wear anything more than a t-shirt, I was still happy to
be there. Back home in the US, where it was also summer, the forests
of California were burning up at a ferocious rate, as the bush in
parts of Australia had done a few years before, costing the lives of
hundreds of people along with so many trees and houses.

My next stop was
Adelaide, thousands of kilometers east and south from Perth, the next
city along the south coast in the sparsely-populated continent.

Dave
and Kathy were celebrating the 21st
year of their Singing Gallery, a fixture of the South Australia folk
music scene, with a new CD featuring 21 artists who had played in it
over the years. I arrived at their house late at night, and they
made use of my fresh pair of ears to get some feedback on how the mix
turned out for some of the songs, concerned as they were that the
vocals were too quiet on one of them. Last time I stayed at their
lovely house in the countryside south of the city I was in a
different room, but this time that room would be taken by a family of
Tibetans who were expected to arrive the following day, which they
did.

In the midst of
the furor over refugees arriving by boat to Australia, here were some
of the few who had been allowed to come by plane. One family out of
the 100 families of Tibetan origin who the Australian government had
been kind enough to allow entry into their formerly whites-only
settlement. This was a family Dave and Kathy had known for many
years. The mother of two was as enchantingly beautiful as she
appeared in the pictures of her as a young woman I had seen on the
walls in the house before. The kids were adorable, despite their
tendency to turn on every available screen in the room at the same
time and stare at all of them at once. For me it was the first time
I had heard the Tibetan language spoken aside from in a documentary,
and it was certainly the first conversation I had had with actual
Tibetans.

They had all grown
up in India, in the region where most of the Tibetan refugees live
there, those who managed to survive the harrowing, often deadly
winter journey from their occupied homeland, through the mountains,
where many have the option of choosing between being shot by Chinese
border guards, or getting frostbite, or both. Our conversations
reminded me of the many conversations I've had in recent years with
immigrants from eastern Europe. For them, the communists are evil
(be they Russian or Chinese), and therefore the capitalists are good.
They still seemed confident of this worldview, but having only spent
a few days in Australia when I met them, they were already starting
to figure out that all was not well in capitalist paradise. At first
they came to Sydney, but were appalled at the lack of community they
found there, wondering where all the people were (in their cars, or
watching TV in their nuclear family units, is the answer, of course).
They took a bus to Adelaide, to visit their friends there, hoping it
might be different. My educated guess is that they'll soon discover
that it's not, unfortunately.

Someone had usedchemical weapons in Syria the day after I arrived in Perth, and now
in Adelaide the drums of war were being beaten hard by John Kerry,
David Cameron, and both of the major contenders for the highest
office in Australia. I sang at a protest in the center of town,
attended by about ten people. I met an anarchist historian who
regaled me with wonderful stories of the Wobblies of early
twentieth-century Australia, who were clearly just as colorful and
just as militant as their counterparts in North America. Paula
introduced me to a local musician who goes by the name of Lord
Stompy. He thanked me for the inspiration that attending my gig at a
Communist Party hangout apparently provided him to write a fabulous
anthemic punk song which he posted on YouTube as his contribution to
the imminent Liberal-National electoral victory, “Who's Gonna Winthe Election” (answer: who gives a shit).

Another
accomplished songwriter and a fixture of the Melbourne music scene
named Les Thomas was responsible for my appearances in Victoria.
After taking years off from songwriting, Les got back into the craft
after his brother was arrested in Afghanistan for being a Muslim
convert in the wrong place at the wrong time (he went there just
before 9/11 and was arrested just after the NATO invasion). I
participated in Les's weekly Unpaved Songwriter Sessions, along with
a young Filipino woman named Celene, who sang raw, short songs about
being a refugee in a not-very-welcoming land.

My
first of four shows in New South Wales was organized by a woman who
actually worked as an accountant for the Immigration department in
the Australian capital, Canberra. Around the time when I was waiting
to find out whether I'd be granted a work permit (having just been
denied entry to New Zealand and then denied a tourist visa to
Australia), a couple weeks before, she recounted a brief anecdote
from her workplace. One of her colleagues in Immigration was walking
past the offices of the War Crimes department. I'm not entirely
clear on what a War Crimes department does in Australia, but in any
case, the folks in that department were talking about me. Her
coworker didn't catch what they were saying about me, but he did
happen to pass by as folks from that branch of the government were
spelling my name out loud for one reason or another.

In Sydney I had
the pleasure of being given an impromptu guided tour of the newest
ship to be added to the fleet of vessels belonging to the SeaShepherd Conservation Society. Much loved by many in Australia, they
were biding their time in preparation for their next voyage to
Antarctica, where they will once again be risking life and limb to do
whatever they can to stop or at least hamper the efforts of the
annual Japanese whale hunt.

As I headed north
from Sydney, the news on the radio was all about the bush fires that
were suddenly raging in the suburbs of that city, devastating fires
far too early in the season. All the folks on the radio were talking
about how unusual these early fires were, and nobody mentioned
climate change.

After another
fundraiser for refugees in Newcastle, I arrived at Byron Bay, the
hippie capital of the country, where Graeme Dunstan spoke about hisattempts to do his part to try to stop the war machine, having just
been given a decidedly light sentence for aiding and abetting the
smashing with a sledgehammer of a helicopter gunship near the town of
Rockhampton, where Australia was conducting joint military exercises
with the country that overthrew their government back in 1975, the
country that is home to the huge spy base near Alice Springs -- the
United States. Here was someone really getting to the root of the
so-called refugee crisis, attempting to disable one of the war
machines that is responsible for creating refugees in the first
place, by bombing and strafing their homes in the many war-torn
countries that Australia likes to keep war-torn.

In Brisbane, the
last stop on my tour Down Under, the new Prime Minister's plans to
outsource Australia's refugees was showing it's first signs of
cracking up, with a prominent politician from Indonesia denouncing
the whole thing, which would supposedly involve sending refugees
intercepted at sea, trying to reach Australia's golden shores, to
Indonesia instead. But if Indonesia doesn't work out, they've still
got Christmas Island.

My tour of
Australia ended as it began, with the words “welcome to Australia.”
No matter that this welcome came on the day before I left – it was
the one that counted. For one such as I from the United States, who
has lived for years in the western part of the country in particular,
it was a familiar scene. But instead of Native Americans
surreptitiously drinking themselves to death in a public park, it was
Australian Aboriginals.

In between slugs
of cheap liquor and drags on cigarettes, these men who said they were
from the Bumma tribe of northern Queensland, told me stories and sang
songs for my benefit, having accurately ascertained that I was a
foreigner. One man sang a very moving song written by another
indigenous Australian named Archie Roach, “They Took theChildren Away.” He claimed to have written it, and he may as well
have, for it was entirely autobiographical. For just as they did in
North America, the original European refugees who settled this land
also thought they should civilize the natives by kidnapping, beating
and raping their children.

The pertinent
question is, are the boarding schools in which those children died or
learned to become alcoholics better or worse than the detention
centers in Nauru and Christmas Island where the would-be refugee
children die or learn to become alcoholics?

David Rovics is
a singer/songwriter based in Portland, Oregon. He is currently in
Europe, on a world tour. His website is www.davidrovics.com.